The Dream
by Agora
Summary: Completed. Follows S8's "DeadAlive". A reoccuring dream forces Scully to consider her feelings for her partner and her hopes for the future.


The dream has been the same for the past few weeks...  
  
I am at home, arranging things in the baby's room. I smile to myself, knowing that it won't be long now until our son will sleep within these walls. I pick up a tiny, fuzzy blanket and hold it to my cheek, feeling its softness. For no reason I can find, tears come to my eyes, well up, and begin to trickle down my face into the blanket.  
  
Suddenly, two strong arms reach around me, one wrapping around my waist, the other taking the blanket from my hand. His chin rests on my shoulder, his face close to mine. I inhale his scent and a shiver runs up my spine. I stand there like a deer caught I headlights, cursing myself silently for not having the courage to turn to him.  
  
"Hormones again, Scully?" he laughs lightly, his lips close enough to my ear to tickle. I bite my bottom lip, grinning like an idiot while still crying. I move to step away from him, succumbing to my fear of the unknown yet again.  
  
He pulls me back, and, with the hand that still rests near my waist, turns me slightly. Smiling down at me, he wipes away my tears with the blanket and wraps his arms around me protectively. "Don't worry, Dana. You don't have to go through this alone. I'm here now, and I'm not going to leave you again."  
  
I return the embrace and look up at him, expectantly. He just smiles, almost goofily, and steps back from me. My nerves steeled, I move with him and bury my face in his chest, inhaling his scent more deeply. My fingers dig slightly into his back as I try to pull him into me; I feel as though I can't ever let him go. I nuzzle his neck, bringing my lips to his skin softly.  
  
His hands move across my back to my shoulders, and he holds me away from him. "Scully, are you feeling alright? Maybe you should lie down. I think everything that's happened recently is starting to catch up with you."  
  
He guides me out of the baby's room and down the hall to my own, like a parent with a child, or worse, a doctor with a patient. Feeling confused and rejected, I begin to cry again. He walks only as far as my door, and then pushes me gently towards my bed. I take a step and then turn to look at him. Surely this isn't happening... Doesn't he feel...? But his back is turned and his hand is pulling the door shut with a quiet finality.  
  
And then I wake up.  
  
I realized something about myself during the last several months. I love Fox Mulder. I love him with a depth and finality that goes beyond everyday cares or worries, that transcends life and death, that exists in despite of everything that fate has brought to us. Or perhaps because of it... I haven't figured that out yet.  
  
I had known that I cared for him deeply. We had been through so many years and so much together even before he was taken from me... More than just my partner, he was my best and truest friend. When I thought there was a chance that I could have a child... Well, no one else even came to mind. I knew that he would be the perfect father.  
  
And I had known that I was attracted to him. Well, I guess lust would be a more accurate description. All of those times that he came over to my house in the middle of the night... Just once, I wished that he had come when he hadn't been drinking. Just once, I wanted him to wake me up not for a case or because he had stumbled upon some great link to the truth, but because he needed me. And then that night... I melt thinking of it. I remember looking back from the bathroom and seeing him in my bed, wondering what he would think when he woke up. I also remember wondering if his VCR had been broken.  
  
When he was taken from me, I pursued him with a desperation that shocked even myself. He was my partner, I told myself and everyone else. He was my friend. And I wouldn't abandon him to monsters. Skinner understood all along, though he wisely didn't say anything. He just helped me, more than I think he'll ever know. I think John understood as well, but his method of protecting me was to try to pull me from, what was in his mind, the imaginary world that Mulder had created and I insisted on living in. Poor John... I pulled him in, and I wonder if he'll ever forgive me for it.  
  
Finding Mulder was, of course, a relief, but I had always assumed that I would find him alive. I assumed that I would save him, as he had saved me so many, many times. That moment, when I saw him lying in the woods, I realized that I had loved him. I realized that I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone or anything in my entire life. He was my life, and my reason for existence. I fell apart, and the only thing that kept me together at all was the feeling that I had to complete his work for him and raise our child. He would return to me through our child.  
  
And now, by some miracle, he has returned himself.   
  
I know no w that there are aliens. I know that there are extraterrestrial forces at work out there, with intentions that can at best be labeled questionable. I know that there are people and forces here on our own planet that are not much better. I know because they killed him, and they have tried to kill me. They have killed others that I love, and they have tried to kill my baby. But I also know, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that there is a God, and he is actively watching this entire scenario play out. I know that there is a God because he has returned Mulder to me.  
  
I know that dreams are an expression of the subconscious, oftentimes indicative of ideas or situations that have been presented in our lives but that we are resistant to, in some way, confronting in our waking lives. I know that they are not real. I am scared that this one is, however.  
  
Love is an unknown quantity. It cannot be programmed, categorized, or easily referenced. It is a growing and changing thing, a life-long journey. I know now that Mulder is my great truth that I have been seeking. Almost everything that I have done in the last eight years has been with or for him.  
  
As well as I know this, I also know that Mulder has his own great truth he is seeking, and it is the same quest that he has been following his whole life. It is not I, and I fear that he does not have the faculties to begin seeking another.  
  
I do not doubt that there is a possibility that my fears are ungrounded. Since he re-awoke, we have been apart for no more than several hours at a time. He is the one that completes me. His search is not over, however, and he does not yet have the answers that he has spent his life seeking. I don't see him abandoning this search. I do see it killing him... Again. I walk through these days, eager to be near him, to help him in whatever way that I can, afraid that if I turn for a moment, he'll be gone again...  



End file.
